


Circles on the Map

by hearts_blood



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Alien Rituals, Alien Sex, F/M, Lack of Communication, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/hearts_blood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Delenn brings Lennier to a place her master once brought her to, to show herself a truth as much as to show him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circles on the Map

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rirenec](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Rirenec).



> Written for Rirenec for the prompt "Sex - Delenn/Lennier. The far reaches of space. 'The dawn of Mankind.'" I didn't _quite_ manage the 'far reaches of space' part, but personally I'm quite satisfied with the result.

_The place you are right now/God circled on a map for you. – Hāfez_

Later, a long time later, Lennier tells himself it was only a ritual, a religious exultation between a great leader and her humble, grateful student. It was easier to remember with equanimity the warm red recesses of the cave, the eerie paintings on the walls that almost seemed to move in the shadows the electric torches cast, around his and and Delenn's bodies as they moved as one, and the patterns of starlight that elevated their coupling into something holy, something divine.

She brought him to the place not long after Sheridan's return from Z'ha'dum, a dry uninhabited moon in unregarded orbit around the homeworld. At any given time of day, Minbar loomed overhead and seems to fill the sky. "The first great war destroyed much of our recorded history," Delenn reminded him, as they walk across the barren dusty plain. Their flyers were behind them, an outcrop of rocks before them. Lennier could see nothing of interest, but Delenn clearly knew where she was bound. "But the Shadows did not destroy these." She led him up the outcrop, and after a step or two Lennier could see a cave among the rough slabs of stone. 

Deep inside the cave, Delenn lead him by torchlight and touch to an interior chamber, whose walls were covered with fantastic drawings, of humanoids and animals and plants and spacecraft, both familiar and strange to Lennier's eyes. "What are they?" he marveled, stretching out a hand to the painted figures, their colors still vibrant after untold eons. He was a good enough historian to know not to touch the pigment, though his fingertips burned with the nearness of the paintings, straining to absorb the accumulated wisdom of the long-dead artists through mere touch.

Delenn's smile was in her voice. "No one truly knows. These paintings were here when our people first walked among the stars. Some of our scientists believe that this moon is the birthplace of the Minbari. Dukhat thought possibly that many thousands of years ago, the Vorlons brought some of our people here, perhaps to keep them safe for some purpose."

"You came here with Dukhat."

"Once... long ago, when I was quite young in his service."

"Why?" Lennier wanted to know, turning from the ancient cave paintings to regard his mentor with curiosity. "What did he wish you to see?"

She stooped beneath a small ledge and produced a covered stone oil lamp, of the kind used in the northernmost mountains by travelers going from encampment to encampment. The seal was airtight, and the oil inside would stay fresh and flammable for many years. No doubt it was the same lamp that Delenn and Dukhat had used on their visit, decades before. She lit it and set it in a little carved recess in the rock, and then extinguished the electric torches. The firelight felt soft against his eyes, after the harsh glare of the white luminescence. He looked around and saw the light streaming through the carved face of the stone. It played and sported across the walls like sunlight on a stream and made the painted figures seem to dance. More than that, it cast weird patterns across his arms and chest, and did strange things to the tone and texture of his skin. 

"What does the light look like, Lennier?"

"It... it looks like a map." He lifted his arm and turned it this way and that in the lamplight. "A map to where?"

Delenn laughed softly. "That was what Dukhat wished to show me." She pressed one hand to Lennier's sternum, in the manner of close friends, and laid the other against his cheek. Her pale seafoam eyes glowed brightly in the dim. "We are all of us, every soul, standing upon a map. At every point in our lives, we stand in a circle on the map of the universe. And no matter where we are at that moment in time, _that_ is where the universe intends for us to be." Her smile held a hint of darkness, as her gaze seemed to look past Lennier and into the future. "There are dark times ahead of us, Lennier, and if we are to survive them, we can no longer doubt that we are where we need to be, and with those we need to be with. I have doubted in the past, my friend, and faltered. I do not have that luxury anymore."

His heart thudded dully against his rib cage, but his hands were very steady as he covered her small, strong hand with his larger one, and touched her face as she touched him. "I do not know what the future holds, Delenn. But I have never doubted that my place is at your side."

Her proud smile was the best reward he could have hoped for, and the sensible, proper thing to do at that moment would have been to step back, to disentangle himself from her touch and find the torches in order to make their way back to the flyers. But the surface of the uninhabited moon seemed very far away, and Minbar and Babylon 5 felt like a half-remembered dream. Her lips were soft beneath his, and her hands slid gladly behind his head to curl around the base of his crest. 

The oil lamp drew maps to undiscovered countries on their skins, on his pale ivory hide and on her warmer pink flesh, and turned his crest to gold and her hair to a red-and-black fire. _We have done this before,_ he thought, taking their clothes and spreading them into a thin mattress on the smooth stone floor. _In places like this,_ he knew, as surely as Delenn pressed him back and straddled his hips and made him her own, _in troubled times like these, Delenn and I have come together._ Where the thought came from, he had no idea, let alone how he could have the presumption to believe something so deeply in his bones. But it rang with the truth of his heart, as strongly as the cave walls rang with their cries of relief and release, and he would not deny it. 

They lay curled close together, wrapped in Lennier's long jacket, waiting for he knew not what. But he would wait forever, gladly.


End file.
